Myth vs. Reality

It is sad and disturbing the number of people I have heard maintain that the war in Iraq is “just like Vietnam.” It’s not just moonbats, either. If it was, it would be easy to dismiss them out of hand. I’ve heard the comparison lamented by intelligent people, people I know and wouldn’t want to argue with. People I respect and admire.

Vietnam veterans — real ones, not impostors and poseurs like Kerry — take exception to the comparisons. They were there, they know damned well the differences. I wasn’t there, of course. I was a kid during Vietnam. My Dad was there, the year I was in fifth grade. I remember the year I was in sixth grade, the year my Dad came home. I remember how long it took him to get used to the idea he was no longer in a war zone. I remember his white hot hatred for the things John Kerry and Hanoi Jane were saying and doing. The memories he sometimes shared over the years since.

Because I wasn’t there, a friend of mine recently informed me that I have no “right” to dismiss anything in the matter of comparisons. (The fact that he wasn’t there either is apparently irrelevant, as he is permitted to continue making the comparisons.)

Colonel Oliver North was there. Colonel North has expressed his thoughts on the matter of comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam. Allow me to share with you some of Colonel North’s comments:

Speaking as someone who has spent nearly an equal amount of time in Iraq as he did during his first tour in Vietnam, Colonel North explains that the parallels between the two are virtually non-existent on the battlefield.

In the press and politics â€“ itâ€™s a different matter. The barons of bombast have decided that Iraq equals Vietnam. Those who make this argument are ignoring some very inconvenient facts.

For starters, Colonel North explains the differences between the adversaries in each war. First, Vietnam:

In Vietnam, U.S. troops faced nearly a quarter of a million conscripted but well trained, disciplined and equipped North Vietnamese Army (NVA) regulars and upwards of 100,000 highly organized Viet Cong (VC) insurgents on a constant basis from 1966 onward. Both the NVA and the VC â€œirregularsâ€ were well indoctrinated in communist ideology, received direct aid from the Soviet Union, Communist China and the Warsaw Pact and benefited from logistics and politico-military support networks in neighboring countries. During major campaigns against U.S. and South Vietnamese forces â€“ of which there were many each year â€“ both the NVA and VC responded to centralized command and control directed by authorities in Hanoi. None of that is true of Iraq.

Now, Iraq:

In the land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, enemy combatants are a combination of disparate Sunni Jihadi-terrorists, disenfranchised Ba’athists, Shia militias aligned with Iran, fanatical foreign Wahhabi Mujahadeen, Muslim Brotherhood-supported radicals and well-armed, hyper-violent criminal gangs, often with tribal connections that are stronger than any ideological, religious or political affiliations. Though many Jihadis receive indoctrination, munitions and refuge from a network of mosques and sectarian Islamic groups, centralized command, control and logistics support is virtually non-existent. Operating in small independent â€œcellsâ€ instead of organized, disciplined military units, the enemy in Mesopotamia has no ability to mount any kind of protracted offensive against U.S. or even lightly-armed Iraqi government forces. Increasingly dependent on improvised explosive devices and suicide-bomb attacks to inflict casualties, the opposition in Iraq is more â€œanarchyâ€ than â€œinsurgency.â€

Next, Colonel North talks about casualties:

The second great fable about the war in Iraq is the horrific casualty rate. This is always the most difficult aspect of any war to address for all comparisons seem cynical. For those of us who have held dying soldiers, sailors, airmen or Marines in our arms it is particularly painful. Yet, it is one of the oft-cited reasons for why we were â€œforcedâ€ to get out of Vietnam â€“ and why we are once again being urged by the media to â€œend the bloodshedâ€ in Iraq. Hereâ€™s a reality check.

Compare …

Over the course of the entire Vietnam War, the â€œaverageâ€ rate at which Americans died as a consequence of armed combat was about 15 per day. In 1968-69, when my brother and I served as Rifle Platoon and Infantry Company Commanders â€“ he in the Army and I in the Marines â€“ 39 Americans died every day in the war zone. In Iraq, the â€œkill rateâ€ for U.S. troops is 2.06 per day.

[Emphasis mine.]

During the 1968 â€œTet Offensiveâ€ in Vietnam there were more than 2,100 U.S. casualties per week. In Iraq, the U.S. casualty rate from all causes has never exceeded 490 troops in a month.

[Again, emphasis mine.]

As of this writing 2,802 young Americans have been killed during three and one half years of war in Iraq. Thatâ€™s roughly the same number killed at Iwo Jima during the first three and one half days of fighting against the Japanese.

[Ditto on the emphasis.]

On 27 February 1968, after a month of brutal fighting and daily images of U.S. casualties on American television, Walter Cronkite, then the host of the CBS Evening News, proclaimed that the Tet Offensive had proven to him that the Vietnam War was no longer winnable. Four weeks later, Lyndon Johnson told the nation that â€œI shall not seek, and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your President.â€ It didnâ€™t matter that Tet had been a decisive victory for the U.S. and South Vietnamese.

The press has a long history of not letting the facts get in the way of their spin.

Todayâ€™s potentates of the press are trying to deliver the same message: that Iraq, like Vietnam, is un-winnable. One television network has gone so far as to broadcast images of U.S. troops being killed by terrorists â€“ making Iraq the first war where Americans get their news from the enemy.

I kind of have to disagree here — seems to me quite a few Americans got their news from the enemy (Kerry and Jane come immediately to mind) back then, too.

The war in Vietnam wasnâ€™t lost during â€œTet â€˜68â€ no matter what Walter Cronkite said. Rather, it was lost in the pages of Americaâ€™s newspapers, on our televisions, our college campuses â€“ and eventually in the corridors of power in Washington. We need to pray that this war isnâ€™t lost the same way.

From your lips to God’s ears, Colonel.

Incidentally, one final thing … the comparison before Colonel North dealt only with Vietnam. It did not include any discussion on the length of time between occupation and final withdrawl from the region. If it had, I’m sure the good Colonel would have pointed out the fact that after WWII, American forces occupied Japan for seven years, and Western Germany did not become fully sovereign until 1955; both countries were long barred from fully rearming, and for decades the United States assumed much of the burden of their defense from the Soviet Union.

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